Sample and Hold

Fabric; 2008

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With all due respect to "Songs Inspired by," "Mark Ronson Edit," and "ft. Wil.i.Am", I'm hard pressed to come up with any phrases that invoke my insta-cynic as definitively as "remix album." After years of being duped, continually, against mounting odds, into hoping that a remix record of [insert artist here] might actually turn out to be great, or least sort of kind of enjoyable, or at least not a dog's breakfast, I'm pretty much ready to give up on the format as a whole. With a handful of exceptions (and even those are EPs), pretty much every remix record that comes to mind felt more like a play at cred points, a contractual obligation, or a self-congratulatory exercise than anything I'd actually put on for pleasure. The remix game is pretty Darwinian anyway; the best ones always do the rounds. Maybe these things just don't work.

Sample and Hold is a remix album from someone you'd think would know better: Bristol's Simian Mobile Disco, who, lest we forget, have racked up some pretty impressive remixes for others over the years. With a discography that peaked with high-profile work for Klaxons, the Rapture, Air, CSS, Ladytron, and Bjork, you'd think these guys would have at least enough appreciation for the form not to sully what was, in retrospect, a sort-of underrated debut (2007's Attack Decay Sustain Release, undercut by the pre-release over-familiarity of some of its biggest singles and overshadowed by Justice's concurrently released †) with a posthumous release of warmed over, go-nowhere remixes from a cast of unknowns, b-level producers and the weirdly resilient Cosmo Vitelli.

Sadly, Sample and Hold is a depressingly phoned-in thing, right down to its cover art, which-- you guessed it-- consists of a slightly re-modified version of the debut's. The misses start early: Simon Baker's opening remix of "Sleep Deprivation" wrinkles the original's rushy pulses into a twerked out tech-house epic that has the audacity to pulse along for 10 minutes without burdening itself with anything remotely resembling a second idea; the Invisible Conga People color over the exuberant, filtered 80s pop of "I Got This Down" with stately piano tinkles and, uh, congas; the Oscillation re-imagine the acid workout "Tits & Acid" as a noirish, proto-big beat clunker in the vein of early Fluke; even Silver Apples, as welcome as they are on this roster, deface the pleasantly billowy closer "Scott" with some detuned synth grunts and a purposely off-kilter drum track.

The few submissions that aren't completely skippable come courtesy the album's more recognizable contributors. DFA's Shit Robot transforms the sleek, liquid-sounding "It's the Beat" into a serviceable grinder, unleashing its titular one-liner in at least some of the right moments, while Studio !K7's Joakim imagines "Hustler" against an entertaining-enough procession of different sounds and techniques. Elsewhere, the album's best moment comes from Erol Alkan, whose sturdily crafted "Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve" remix of "Love" outclasses everything around it by half. In the end, though, those middling highlights hardly amount to much. What's worse is that one of the album's more interesting initial features-- the fact that it's a track-for-track remix record rather than a collection of available leftovers-- ends up working against it. From here on out, it's going to be tough to listen to Attack Decay Sustain Release without flashing on its mutant twin brother. It should have finished him off in the womb.